‘Better Call Saul’ Season 3 Finale Recap: Adios

Season 3, Episode 10: ‘Lantern’

Fittingly enough, the Season 3 finale of “Better Call Saul” was all about goodbyes. Jimmy said goodbye to his senior law practice and the office where he and Kim worked. Howard said goodbye to Chuck, having masterfully engineered his former mentor’s exit from Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill. Chucks bid adieu to his sanity and then his life.

Hector most likely says farewell to the use of his limbs, though that is a parting he will learn about in a hospital soon enough. And Kim says so long to the grind of a one-woman start-up law practice, having reordered her priorities (Blockbuster home videos and nachos now top the list) after a car crash that nearly killed her.

As it has in the past, the show whipsawed viewers, this time over the issue of Chuck’s mental state. He was on the mend just a few chronological days ago, looking forward to a barbecue with friends and to a life surrounded by colleagues and the electromagnetic pulses that turned him into a shut-in. He ends in a full-on relapse, and a suicidal one at that.

Why the change? My sense is that Chuck’s electricity phobia is a stand in for his conscience, which begins to torment him after he is ushered out the door of his firm with $3 million of Howard’s money. That instant settlement had to rankle, in part because Howard demonstrated what magnanimity really looks like.

“You won,” Howard says to Chuck, a devastating pair of final words.

Gut Punch No. 2 lands in the form of Jimmy, who visits and attempts a heartbreakingly sincere, painfully honest rapprochement. He’s brutally rebuffed by Chuck, who delivers this eviscerating line: “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but the truth is you’ve never mattered all that much to me.”

Good thing he didn’t want hurt Jimmy’s feelings!

That line is beyond cruel. And on the evidence of the flashback at the start of the episode — a cozy scene in which the older McGill reads in a tent to the younger one — I’d say it isn’t true. I think Chuck’s mental turmoil in the aftermath of Jimmy’s peace overture leaves him conscience-stricken and ready to die in a blaze of his own making.

Compare this with Jimmy’s own methods for coping with guilt. He can’t persuade the seniors at Sandpiper Crossing to re-embrace Irene, the leader of the class-action settlement, who has been deemed inexcusably selfish by her peers. Jimmy finds this every bit as appalling as Irene does, and he engineers a kind of reverse sting, turning himself into the target and confessing all his mischief on a hot mike at a chair-yoga class.

The admission has terrible blowback for Jimmy, who predicts he will soon lose all of his clients — “They’re smearing my name across the tristate area” — and, at least for now, the money he stood to earn from the Sandpiper settlement. But unlike Chuck, he isn’t mentally tormented.

Let’s turn to the mobster side of the show, in which only Nacho seems to have a conscience. He is ready to shoot Hector, worried that his boss is about to whack his man-of-principles father. But he does so just as a meeting unfolds that he apparently didn’t know about — a face-to-face between Hector and Juan Bolsa (Javier Grajeda), who has come to make sure Hector uses Gus Fring’s chicken trucks for transporting the cartel’s drugs. When Hector works himself into a frenzy of rage, he gobbles a few of his pills, but they are the ineffective ones that Nacho has planted.

See you in a wheelchair, Don Hector.

Fring shoots Nacho one of his trademark blank and baleful stares as the ambulance pulls away, suggesting to me that the man has instantly figured out Nacho’s perfidy. I was waiting for Gus to say something like, “Nacho, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

Some stray, End-of-Season Thoughts:

“Better Call Saul” is a singular hybrid of a show, one that is trying to: 1) tell a nuanced psychological story about two brothers 2); tell a nuanced and sometimes violent story about a handful of thugs; 3) highlight the inner and ugly workings of law firm life; and 4) do all this while constrained and guided by the contours of “Breaking Bad.”

That’s a lot, and fans of one element of the show might be indifferent to another. “The Sopranos” attempted a version of this hybrid — it was a mob story as well as a marvelously executed soap opera. But it had one tone, which is to say the two principle threads were woven tightly together. “Better Call Saul” is really jumping from one genre to another, often separated by nothing more than a smash cut.

“You just want this to be ‘Breaking Bad!’” the show’s most ardent fans will shout at me. Not really. I think “Better Call Saul” should have its own feel, its own style, its own moral universe. But there is a difference between dull and deliberate. Deliberate is watching Mike take apart that car in the desert, trying to find Gus Fring’s bug. Not much happens, but it’s surprisingly riveting. Dull is watching Chuck wrestle with his illness and his demons.

I appreciate the zigs and zags of Jimmy’s journey, which has him toggling between charming hustler and charmless hustler. But three seasons into the show, the plot ought to have more sense of direction and a more compelling thrust. There’s a “one thing after another” feel to the story.

“But that describes life!” fans might say. True. But this isn’t life. This is a TV show. It ought be more consistently entertaining.

That said, “Better Call Saul” entertains more often than just about anything else on TV, and I dearly hope that AMC renews it, something it has apparently not yet done.

So, a special request for all you commenters: Explain to AMC why we need “Better Call Saul” back. Stat. I could list a dozen reasons, but I’m going to sign off with just one.